Publishers Should Avoid Custom Tech Mistake
Sponsored by
Work in media long enough and you’re going to hear the inevitable conversation about needing a new content management system (CMS). It’s inevitable. I’ve been part of it a couple of times myself. For any number of reasons, publishers determine that their current technology can’t support the exact use case they’re working with and decide the only answer is to build something totally custom. “We need flexibility,” they say, “and our current technology won’t let us achieve it.”
And so, they hire or outsource to engineers to create something unique. To start, everything is fine. But then you want to add a new feature. Then another one. Years go by and that custom CMS is now riddled with various features that are used infrequently and require a full-time team to support. What was meant to give you flexibility actually limits you considerably.
Sponsored by
Leading publishers like Vox Media, TIME, Dow Jones, and more are using WordPress VIP to power their digital experiences. The enterprise content management system allows for:
- Improved efficiency, allowing writers and editors to publish faster and streamline workflows
- Increased audience engagement through data-driven insights and personalized content experiences
- Handling of large traffic spikes without fear of your site going down (like TIME when Taylor Swift won Person of the year)
- Significant cost savings by optimizing resources enabling you to do more with less
WordPress already powers more of the internet than any other CMS. Get that with the enhanced capabilities with WordPress VIP.
There are two reasons for this.
First, the only way to keep technology current is to have people who are updating it regularly. That team you hired to build the CMS converts to a team required to maintain that CMS. The innovation goes away and instead, you’re paying a lot of money to support a piece of software that is inevitably going to fall behind what’s out there.
Second, because of how much of your resources are going to maintain a piece of software, you have less time to invest in user-facing initiatives that can directly impact the business in a positive way. Building software for your internal teams doesn’t drive revenue the same way as building for your readers. As a result, the front end starts to suffer as time goes on.
This is inevitable. I have heard stories about massive media companies with very large development teams spending an incredible amount of time just supporting their clunky CMS. And I’m only talking about content management systems right now. There are media companies that build their own email service providers; I’ve heard of others that try to build their own analytics, ad serving, customer data platforms and the list goes on.
This is not smart. It’s a waste of money, a waste of time and it will actively harm your business over the long term.
There are readers who will disagree with this. Heads of tech product and engineers will say I’m wrong. But as the saying goes, to a hammer, everything is a nail. It’s the same for product managers and engineers. They believe their job is to build software, but they often confuse their mandate and focus far more of their energy on internal tooling rather than what is best for the reader.
That’s a big reason why I built A Media Operator on WordPress. Morning Brew’s former CEO, Austin Rief, gave me a good piece of advice when I was first building AMO. He said, “technology is a distraction. Find a piece of technology that will work and then get back to doing what matters: creating content.” So I went with WordPress.
That point from Rief is an important one that publishers must accept as they continue to evolve going forward. The need to become more lean has never been more obvious. When resources are limited, we have a few choices of where to pull spend from. If you’re using a custom CMS, you need to spend money to support it. But every dollar you spend supporting a piece of technology is one fewer dollar that can go toward content.
Consider the average cost of a software engineer in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median cost of a software engineer in the United States in 2023 was $132,270. A journalist was $57,500. For the cost of one software engineer, you could have two journalists. Assume each one of those creates four stories a week. That’s over 400 stories in a year for the cost of one software engineer.
There’s a reason that Vox Media decided to shut down its own CMS, Chorus. Not only had it built custom software, but it had licensing partners. In other words, it was responsible for both its own internal business and other publications. In 2022, it told its six clients that they had 18 months to find a new solution. A spokesperson for Vox Media told Adweek:
“Vox Media has made the decision to wind down our Chorus SaaS business to better focus our company’s resources on supporting our industry-leading editorial brands, and where we see opportunities for immediate and long-term growth.”
That is the exact right attitude for a very simple reason: it’s hard for companies to do two things really well. If you’re trying to build custom technology and create world-class content to serve an audience, you’re going to do both of them subpar. The best businesses are myopically focused and for publishers, that means focusing on their audience.
CEO Jim Bankoff effectively confirmed that at Cannes in 2023 when he told Axios:
“It is an entirely different market going out and servicing SaaS clients — one that we were succeeding in but one that we said, ‘All right, if we’re going to focus as a company, let’s focus on our audience-based businesses.'”
Vox went with WordPress VIP. There are plenty of them out there. Irrespective of which CMS you choose, the key point here is that publishers cannot compete with the development resources that a software company has. This brings us back to the point above: you may start off at parity, but as time goes on, you spend more time maintaining your software and less time building new features. Over years, your tech lags seriously behind.
Instead, do as Vox did. In the announcement about partnering with WordPress VIP, it said it wanted its creative and development teams to focus on experiences instead of platforms, continuing to create industry-leading content for their audiences.
That’s the focus. You still need designers and software engineers on the team, but instead of them working on platforms, have them work on experiences that delight users. That will move the needle for the business and allow the focus to be on the right things.
But this extends far beyond just the content management system. It’s a broader thesis that I believe more publishers need to get comfortable with. How we run our businesses is not unique. If you send a newsletter, it’s a very similar process to any other publisher. If you publish an article, it’s a very similar process to any other publisher. If you’re primarily a video media company, your process is very similar to any other publisher.
Our processes are not unique. Our content is. So, find technology that allows you to focus all of your energy on what is unique. Take the time to understand what custom tech exists internally and see if there is a solution out there that can do it better. Here are some questions you should ask:
- If I build this custom tech, how much will it cost and how much will it cost to maintain?
- How efficient is the custom tech when it comes to hosting and server space?
- Once that custom tech is live, how much will it cost to create new features?
- How long will it take to create those new features and what is that time worth?
A mistake businesses make is only looking at the hard costs—how much a software contract costs—and not the soft costs, otherwise known as people. Another mistake is they don’t appreciate the long-term costs—those hosting costs I mentioned—and the opportunity cost of being distracted. All of this is money.
There was an era where media companies thought they could build their own software. But so many of them learned that it distracted and held the business back. Don’t build unique, custom technology. Build unique content and audience experiences. That will grow your business.
And if you want to learn more about our partner, WordPress VIP, click here.
